Like its predecessors, the BeagleBone sports an ARM processor. This time around it’s a TI AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8. It will ship with a 2 GB microSD card and has an Ethernet port and USB connection. The dual pin headers on either side of the board are designed to receive ‘Capes’ for expansion. Currently a DVI cape is in the works, with HDMI and others to follow.

Linux is running on board and one of the best features we see in the video after the break is the browser-based programming interface. When connected to a network, the BeagleBone serves HTML5 web pages. One of these is an IDE that lets you write and execute code directly from your browser.

‘We’ll generally refer to them as “capes” because Underdog is a beagle and he wears a cape. The term “shields” is nice, but that has some implication of Arduino and this is definitely not an Arduino clone.’

Yeah, I saw that too. Thing is, I still personally disagree. I think “capes” just sounds weird. Arduino kind of invented the concept of “shields” and the term (I think, please don’t flame me if I’m wrong), and so yeah, right now it has some implication of Arduino. However, the term shield makes a lot of sense now that its become part of the parlance, and I think that trying to get “capes” into the parlance would be more difficult than trying to change the meaning of “shield” to mean a generic shield, rather than an Arduino shield. They could avoid confusion by generally always saying “beaglebone shield” as a phrase together, since generally the alternative would be what are generally already called “arduino shields”. Its basically already a generic term, thats why it usually has “Arduino” in front of it for clarification.

I have a novel idea… Since a main board is often generically referred to as a “motherboard” what if we came up with a generic term for the add ons as well… Maybe something referencing back to “mother” like a ‘son board’ or maybe keeping in line with the female connotation (we men do kind of have a thing for females) like “daughterboard”. That’s it! Let’s call the “daughterboards”!

I am one of those people who collects things like these- TI Launchpad, Arduinos, Bumble B (no longer available), Dockstar, Bifferboard for various projects and tinkering. I like seeing a diversity of products for their different strengths and weaknesses- ethernet, IOs, peripherals, power consumption, etc. This board looks interesting but I am going to put all further microcontroller purchases on hold until the Raspberry Pi comes out. I think the Pi has the potential to dominate the upper end of these project boards and it is hard to beat the price.

It would be nice if instead of only 3.3V, some microcontrollers could handle up to 24V. I know Ruggeduinos can handle 24 VDC on their input pins (which makes interfacing with nearly anything industrial quite a bit easier) although the allowed current draw is still quite limited. Plus, they don’t have a Mega version as of yet.

Can someone tell me why this is so much better than the Raspberry Pi, which is being release soon? Both have a clock speed of around 700MHz. R.Pi has 256Mb ram, and I think beaglebone has around 512Mb. Are the differences enough to necessitate triple the price for the beaglebone? Sure the Beaglebone has breakouts, but that’s about all I see extra.

The Beaglebone’s primary market seems to be the hacker/maker, while Raspberry PI is targeting low cost computer. I suspect though, as usual the hackers/makers will bend what they have to fit. As the R-Pi is less than half the price, I know which way I will be jumping, as ignoring some of R-PI features costs less than adding to the BeagleBone.

If you are looking to develop a mass produced product the Beaglebone design is easily reproduced when compared to the R-Pi. If Beagle could have added real POE or Wi-Fi for under the price of a USB dongle they could have an alternative product.

Unfortunately price (over quality a lot of the time) or brand rules and I’m not sure Beagle fits into either camp. If I were at camp Beagle, for the last couple of months I would have been looking to offer what R-Pi cannot.

Traditionally, all schematics from the BeagleBoard org have been available, and also, I’ve confirmed that the datasheet for the TI AM3358 is readily available – it took me 10 seconds to find it. TI is usually VERY good about providing hardware documentation.

The BCM2835 in the Pi – Basically good luck getting the datasheet unless you’re a megacorporation or an ex-employee like Eben of the RPi project is.

Also, as others have said, clock-for-clock, the Cortex-A8 is quite a lot more powerful than the ARM11 of the BCM2835.

The 1.27mm header for the GPIOs and SPI of the Pi will be a LOT harder to work with than the dual single-row 0.1″ headers of the BeagleBone.

So in short – if you want a cheapo “set top box” style device, the Pi is a good choice.

If you want to do ANY sort of embedded computing work (hardware hacking and such), go for the BeagleBone.

This is likely going to result in my LM3S6965 dev board being permanently shelved. TI’s micros from the Luminary division are uncharacteristically (for TI) unfriendly to open-source/open-hardware due to the atrocious licensing of their helper libraries.

So in short – if you want a cheapo “set top box” style device, the Pi is a good choice.

It’s nothing like a cheapo set top box, it has been designed to be a low cost versatile PC, something that you can experiment with and can be destroyed in the process, without a huge financial cost.

If you want to do ANY sort of embedded computing work (hardware hacking and such), go for the BeagleBone.

Can you quantify this statement? As once you get over the learning curve (Linux on an embedded ARM device), differences in development platform is irrelevant. In fact, I will go as far to say Linux on Beagle or R-Pi has very little to do with embedded work, its closer to PC development.

I can’t directly reply to JohnnyMax’s comment, so I had to hit “reply” to my own:
“Can you quantify this statement? As once you get over the learning curve (Linux on an embedded ARM device), differences in development platform is irrelevant. In fact, I will go as far to say Linux on Beagle or R-Pi has very little to do with embedded work, its closer to PC development.”
No, differences in platform are not irrelevant. If you want to interface with “stuff” using GPIOs/I2C/SPI/whatever, then it is a major hindrance if there are very few interfaces and they’re on a tiny 1.27mm pitch header. Also, said header becomes irrelevant if you can’t get the datasheet for the silicon controlling the I/O lines on that header.

With the Bone – you get a full IC datasheet for the TI AM3358. With the Pi – you get NOTHING in terms of documentation for the Broadcom SoC.

I agree. An Intel D525 motherboard with the dual core 1.8GHz atom is like $65. There are probably cheaper ones out there as well. Add $10 for a 1GB RAM stick and $2 for a 4GB usb flash drive to boot and store data and you’re in business.

I dont get it, you guys will spend $89.00+ $59.00 to make a small XBMC box instead of grabbing a used Apple TV1 for $40.00, slap in a $50.00 mini pci crystalHD decoder card and blow out the OS with linux+XBMC to get a far superior device for a lot less with ZERO effort.

Nifty device, but combine one ofthese sub $100 devices with the Google USB spec and you’ve got an inexpensive (and already encased) programmable device that has networking, gps, an accelerometer a touchscreen and a simple programming API.

Hi Guys,
I wanted to know whether it is worth buying Beaglebone for learning(I am a novice) ARM programming and Linux kernel programming. I want to be an expert like you all. Please lend me a hand here.
I thought I could use built-in JTAG debugging with Beaglebone to learn debugging easily with out the need for any other special hardware.(Am I correct?). Also is the CCS available freely to use with Beaglebone for JTAG debugging?